Mapping the Expansion of Consciousness in the Context of Our Relationship

Dr. Neil describes the role of physical, emotional, and mental separateness with me, his wife, as a foundation for the expansion of consciousness. He suggests that the divine manifests separate people and objects to experience itself in infinite ways. He explores the experience of emptiness as his essential nature and how it shapes his personal love, our love, and non-dual love without an object. The balance between separateness/independence and unity/Oneness is a tricky issue for every relationship. But, ultimately, we are all joined in the divine.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Greetings, welcome back to the podcast. Today we're going to explore and try to map Dr. Neil's evolving consciousness in the context of our relationship and his role as a spouse or husband, and um how that's changing through the years as his awakening expands. Okay, Dr. Neil.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

So let's see if we can map it on all these different layers and levels. The first layer would be the physical. Um, because that's part of the human development rather than the soul development. And same with thoughts and identity and with the heart, that we have separate um experiences and awareness of that. And so your separateness continues even while you experience non-dual states, yes, so there's separateness and oneness and togetherness, but it's really important to actually keep the separateness well defined, and um because um we can head into the pre-trans fallacy if we don't hold that position uh in our minds. In other words, we could become fused with each other, and your feelings could be the same as my feelings, my feelings, your feelings, our bodies are not separate from each other, our minds are not separate from each other.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

And then the pre-trans fallacy is that we believe that that's the higher unity or oneness, correct.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

So holding this is really the fundamental ground of relationship, uh, and it's important to hold it, to experience it as part of what we are. So as we move into more subtle realms, um, I guess emptiness is what comes up for me next, beyond the physical, beyond the ego, uh, as the um what about soul? That comes afterwards. Um emptiness arises, and I experience emptiness as my nature. I experience your emptiness as the same emptiness, but experienced from a different perspective. I experience your emptiness as having your flavor to it, it's your flavor of the nature of emptiness, flavored emptiness, what's the flavor? Flavor is more feminine, more intellectual, has a quality to it, and that quality is just how you experience it because it comes from your nature, not from my nature or somebody else's nature. Okay, and you may not experience it, but you will eventually experience it soon.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Yeah, I don't consciously experience my emptiness.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

All right, so my awareness is that when you do get to that level of experiencing emptiness, it will be the same emptiness as my emptiness, but it will be experienced totally differently to my my experience, and that's true for all human beings. And the fact that we are in love and in deep relationship with each other means that uh there's a reflection of that emptiness to me, so I have a sense of what your emptiness feels like, and uh, and then if we go a little deeper than that, we can look at the fact that the emptiness is an access point to oneness, to being everywhere and everything, and my oneness. When I say my oneness, it's my experience of the oneness, it's different to your experience of the oneness even now. So, whatever your level of identity of the oneness is, it's different to mine.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

So the oneness is the same, but the vehicle is subjective, and so it's filtered through my nature or your nature, correct, and that's the way that the universe is created, so that every person's experience of consciousness is slightly different, or majorly different, which may explain why a lot of the teachers say things that seem to contradict others, you know, they had the the teachings or the scriptures or their transmissions are filtered through their subjectivity.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

Correct. So the clearer your sense of separateness, your body sense, your emotional sense, your mental sense, your your ego identity, the clearer it is, clearer meaning it's not intruding on your consciousness, the more direct the experience is. Yeah, I am everywhere right at this moment. I'm in this room and I'm everywhere, and I have that feeling knowing that, and also have the perception, visual perception, auditory perception. Uh, let's take the galaxy, for example. I have the experience of the galaxy visually, and I have it auditorily, and I have it tactally, there's appealing to the galaxy, and beyond that level is the uh what we call the non-dual levels, where there's such a thing like love. On a personal level, I love you, and you love me, I hope. And but on a cosmic level, there is love without doer or a receiver or an action, and that means that that's part of my consciousness that there's love, that I am love, and that you are in that love, it's richer than somebody that I was not personally involved with, but it's it's also somewhat distinct, separate at the same time. So when you say I am in that love, the dualistic love is you love me, the non-dual love is we are love, we are love, everything is love, and we are in the reality of love rather than the action of we are loving each other, yes, and it's it's more intense than loving each other because it's universal, there's no separation between the love that I experience and that you experience, or can experience, or will experience. There's no there's no, it's far more blissful and divine and timeless, it's timeless, it's spaceless, there's no boundary to it. So one might look at it and say, Yes, but this is my experience, not your experience, but this is ultimately everybody's experience, and everybody's gonna experience this this love from their own personal point of view. So the uh the nature of the divine is that it's manifesting all these separateness, separate human beings and all separate objects and separate. Oh, it's more than this planet, more than this planet. There are beings on other planets as well. But um the nature of the divine is wanting to actually experience itself from a zillion perspectives, and that's why it creates our separateness in order to experience itself, all of these different angles. So the relationship ultimately is one with the divine, and ultimately that's how we connect deeply. So in my body, I experience my body as being present in the physical sense, as normal as normal people do, normal consciousness, but I always experience my body as infinite, as part of pure consciousness, and you're in there, you're in my body, and and I'm in your body because everything is in your body, because everything's in my body, you know, it's not like uh there's a separateness on this level.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

So, one of the things we're finding as your consciousness expands is that our needs change. My needs are still about my separateness and my personal history and my emotional wishes, and your needs are changing in that way.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Yes, the best way to understand this um consciousness unfolding is in the form of a pyramid. In other words, the base is the physical, and in that sense, the ego are all the bases, and the base needs to be broad, and the higher you go, the bigger the base needs to be, otherwise it's imbalanced, and you can lose it. And I think that's a mistake that a lot of people make is they go for the highest level of consciousness without having the base continually growing. So emotionally, I'm always loving you in a different way. Emotionally, I'm always experiencing the love that is universal in a different way, but grows on all these levels. The ego grows, the soul grows, divine grows, it moves into more and more the infinite.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

But I think what I was saying was I can feel the impersonal quality of your love, right? And I can feel your love expand beyond me, right? And contain so much more, and so your needs are changing in the relationship. Can you talk about that?

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Very hard to talk about consciousness and needs because they don't come from that angle, it comes from the more you evolve, the more it's about giving, and it's about being seen as that, and about being witnessing yourself as that. Obviously, the ego keeps growing, which is different to you know many schools of thought and spiritual development, which try to negate the ego in order to reach higher levels, which is possible and on a temporary basis, but ultimately one needs to come back and own the ego, and own the ego as being huge, not a minor thing. And it's the same thing about the connection with each other. So we we wrote about 30 years ago, we wrote an article on together on the third body. Do you remember that? And that is that between us there is another being, another body or third body, and it has physical form and energetic form and emotional form and mental and buddhic and atmic and spiritual form, and it exists as long as we exist. Our weeness, our weeness, and you know, we tend not to look at it that way because in our culture, separateness and the body is focused on as primary identity, but really this primary identity is actually the weeness, which is the reflection of the divine, out of which all the separateness emerges. So we're totally connected on the divine level, the one on the divine level, and the separateness is necessary in order for us to experience this the journey of love, the journey of growing and separating.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

And what about the soul level?

SPEAKER_01 14:21

You didn't mention that, soul level, yeah. The soul is an interesting thing because it's both individual and collective. So individually, we each have our own soul, and that allows us to develop from amoeba to something very conscious, so it's infinite in its uh evolution and its growth, and it never stops moving and growing, and it goes through many lifetimes in which it keeps evolving. Uh, and the soul is also uh connection, so uh we have a group soul, uh, we belong to a community of souls which has this similar purpose. You and I are part of that same group, and we merge with each other on that level, and we were together before this lifetime, before all our lifetimes, and we will be together afterwards because that's part of our joint connection, and the soul also um evolves uh in this way as a collective group, and you know, and the love that we share with each other brings us closer to that collective, we're not separate, not on the ultimate level, yeah, you know, so but we have to actually live the out live out our separateness as well.

SPEAKER_00 15:55

So there are these levels of separateness and intimacy that feels joined and spiritual um unity that we may or may not feel. You feel, I sometimes don't feel it. And so there are these kind of levels of um what do I want to say? Uh separateness and unity, and there's a tension between them in a lot of relationships. A lot of relationships are about the struggle to find that territory of intimacy or sameness or overlap that um also allows for independence, closeness and independence, right? Right, separation and intimacy. So what we're doing here is we're adding another level onto that psychological conversation, which is the spiritual oneness or unity that pre-exists, the separateness, right? That's the source of our individual souls, and at the same time that post-exists, if that's a word, our spiritual evolution. So we're coming from the unity, we're in the unity, and we're going to the unity.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Yeah, once we get to uh subtle levels of consciousness, it's there's huge paradoxes. So, you know, we're we're in this unity, this oneness, you know, and we never leave it on some level, and we never return on some level, uh, because we're timeless and spaceless, we're outside time space. So in some ways, we're you know, we're uh you know, we're eternal.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

But that's the illusion of ignorance that we leave it.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

That's the illusion of ignorance. So on so on that level, love is always present, and it doesn't mean a subject or an object, person or receiver, give or receiver.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

So for people who are single, you have any advice? Because for us, the relationship has been such a part of the path, such a significant practice, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:29

We're doing it now, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:31

And for people who are single and don't have a partner who's conscious and evolving with them, or they're widowed, right, or they haven't met someone. What happens?

SPEAKER_01 18:44

Well, we individually can grow consciousness-wise, and we can grow in relationship, and that's richer. We can get that, it's very complex because, for example, I'm in a relationship with my mother who's dead, so you know, I love her, and she's on the fourth plane, and we communicate and we share, and she tells me how much she loves me, and I tell her that as well, and uh so it doesn't have to necessarily be in a physical form or in uh on that level. One can love a guru, love uh pause, or love children, love nieces or nephews, you know. So um relationships are have always got this balance between separateness and oneness, they always have that balance between them because um and there's always that flow between unity and separateness and and a balance of the two. So you know, so what's happened for me is that as I've become more conscious, I've noticed that I give uh naturally and um take care of myself at the same time. So I'll give you an example of that. Um, I have a men's group that's been running for 24 years now, and for 24 years, twice a year, we have retreats for three days, and I design the retreats, and the way I design the retreats is a subject like compassion, for example, and there's exercises and there's dyads and there's processes which we experience that, and and I include myself, so I I actually create the structure and I include myself in the experience, so I do the work myself at the same time as I'm actually giving to the to the group, so that's a good example of how one can take care of oneself and another, and love oneself and another at the same time, and you know, and there's always that sort of balancing aspect of consciousness where love doesn't want to get divided, consciousness doesn't want to get divided, so it's actually um it's really about um not between self or other, but between spouse or other. So the love is there.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

So you're using that as an example of sort of the foundation of the pyramid of self-care. And I think there isn't a lot of focus on self-care in the spiritual world, although with yoga and diet and exercise, there's focus on lifestyle. But I think what what I'm hearing you say is the self-care and the other care for you developed in tandem. Because you were when I met you, you were very other centered, and your self-care has really developed. And so you're what I'm hearing you say is that is part of one of these lower rungs on the pyramid that's foundational. Okay, so returning to our theme, um, is there anything else we want to say about non-duality in relationship?

SPEAKER_01 22:37

Yes, I would say ultimately we all join in the divine, we all join, we all have our separateness and our oneness in the divine, and those are eternal, so there is no dissolving of separateness and no dissolving of oneness. One can experience oneness without separateness and separateness without oneness, but ultimately they're all they both belong, they're infinite, and they're part of the journey, and they're part of the story, and they're part of the divine's nature. And human human love is part of that, you know, the intimacy that happens between spouses, like can happen, uh, is about that oneness and separateness, and supporting each other in our separateness and our oneness.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

Thank you for listening. Bye bye. Bye bye.